Slashdot Mirror
HP Launches Moonshot
New submitter linatux writes "HP has announced their 'Moonshot 1500 server' — up to 1,800 servers per 47U rack are supported. The tech certainly seems to be an advance on what is currently available — will it be enough to revive HP's server fleet?"
From Phoronix: "Moonshot began with Calxeda-based ARM SoCs, but in the end HP settled for Intel Atom processors. Released today were HP's Moonshot system based on the Intel Atom S1200. Hewlett-Packard claims that their Moonshot System uses 89% less energy, 80% less space, 77% less cost, and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Low power and massive amounts of parallel cores is alright, but does it compute? How do these low power servers benchmark against EC2 or equivalent? This article didn't talk benchmarks. Maybe you get all these gains in consumed power, cost, space etc... because it is 90% less powerful than competitors.
Build a man a fire and you warm him for a day. Set a man on fire and you warm him for the rest of his life.
And we all know that datacenter servers are used only for running the front-end of 3D games. Oh no, this product must be DOOMED!
Atom processors are notoriously slow. You can't play 3d video games on them.
Yes, you can. :-)
I managed to play Orbiter on a reasonable resolution (1280x1024x16) and got an acceptable (barely, I admit) framerate on my Atom 330 box. That it's my Media Center and torrent server, by the way.
Granted, the Game of the Year will not run on this setup. :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
HP tried this with Transmeta a while back, and produced blades that completely sucked - WAY too slow. Individual machines on blades are dead, unless you need HPC type power, and Atom ain't that. If you need to squeeze 1800 limp servers into a rack, VMWare and its children are already there.
Sorry HP, you suck. Go back to making shitty printers, and then get out of the way. Hopefully your corpse will provide the fertilizer for some new market leader to grow from.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
From the HP Site: "The HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis has 45 hot-pluggable servers installed and fits into 4.3U. The density comes in part from the low-energy, efficient processors. The innovative chassis design supports 45 servers, 2 network switches, and supporting components."
Each pluggable unit support 1x 2GHZ intel atom S1200 series cpus (2x core, 4x thread), up to 1 dimm @ 8gb, and one SFF sata drive. That gives you 90 cores/180 threads, 360GB's in 4.3u.
For comparison a 6RU cisco UCS chasis can put down up to 160 Cores / 320 threads, 4TB of memory. Those are high performance Xeon cores. Not sure on the $$$ per compute/memory between the two.
The really big question is are there enough use cases for that many "thin" servers. At 2 cores and 8GB of ram you are very thing by modern standards and there is 0 opportunity for vertical growth.
Would somebody please find the marketers/editors that wrote this and shoot them? THXBYE
Hi. I'm part of the engineering team tasked with tracking down and eliminating people upon request, who have managed to slight someone else on the internet. We've logged your request and will get to it as quickly as possible. However, due to our limited budget and the unexpected popularity of our service, the high volume of requests will delay our response time. We currently estimate that we'll be able to service your request on October 27th, 2238, at 8:00 pm.
Also, our records indicate that you have an appointment with us on June 27th, 2027, at 3:35pm. Please be prompt. The internet as you know it depends on it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So...former HP customer, or former employee?
I'm guessing you haven't actually used HP servers or compared them to the competition. In my experience they completely kick Dell's butt, and give IBM a real run for their money, at much lower cost. I evaluated a ProLiant Gen8 and the manageability features were pretty impressive. The thing can update it's firmware and send SNMP traps, etc, from bare metal, without an OS.
Granted, HP had some crappy CEOs, and on the low-end consumer stuff they race to the bottom with everyone else, but their servers are serious and arguably industry-leading. They also sell more PCs than anyone anywhere, unless you start counting every iPod touch as a "computer."
Someone at Phoronix really needs to learn basic math. The Chassis is 4.3U and hold 45 of these Moonshot servers, so a 47U rack could fit 10 chassis' for a total of 450 servers.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
Nazi is a proper noun and thus must be capitalized.
And yet you don't know how to spell "capitalised". Bloody colonials...
But in all seriousness, this is a great idea for crowd sourcing.
Acquire startup funding and open a website for sponsors and volunteers. You could run it on TOR and pay the volunteers via bitcoin.
Donations are weighted depending on the amount donated, people could vote for the target they most wanted addressed first. The balances could just continue to grow until a volunteer accepts the job. Of course it would have to be a COD service and some sort of clear proof would be required, but it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
You could probably even get corporate sponsorship.
"[...]and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Wait, what? How in the world did they measure this? I'm seriously curious as to this dubious number.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Show me all the ARM Cortex CPU's with hardware virtualization support and ECC memory controllers.
I'll absolutely second this - HP's servers kick ass, quite frankly. They've had a few pretty major problems in recent years (P400 and P800 array controllers were absolute pieces of shit from a reliability standpoint, and the P410 STILL doesn't work quite right with SATA drives, though it rocks with SAS disks), but overall the engineering that goes into HP servers puts them well ahead of their competition, from what I've experienced. I've used Dell, IBM, white box, and HP, on the scale of "hundreds to thousands" of each brand, stretching back 10+ years.
The HP's have been more reliable, more configurable, more robust (yes, this is different from reliable), more manageable, and FAR better supported. There's a reason companies pay a premium for HP hardware, and it's because it pays for itself many over during the life of the hardware.
There are companies and applications that don't need that kind of reliability and run on shoddy white-box hardware... think Google, Facebook, etc. There are others, particularly stateful services like telephony and conferencing, that depend on reliable hardware. For those like that, servers like what HP provides will always be in demand. So long as HP maintains their focus on engineering in the server space, they won't be going anywhere soon.
"Moonshot" refers to their business strategy. This is a 'moonshot', high-risk, high-reward, but more than likely to just go into the crapper like pretty much everything except their calculators and printers.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I have a more powerful device in my pocket.
I thought you were just glad to see me.
Well the Cortex A15 has both.
Nops, it's a standard Intel motherboard with a I8294G graphic chipset. Barely acceptable, but it does the job. And, as you said, as a desktop machine it's a pain in the mouse's ass.
I had a harsh time, however, until I manage to install and configure the correct drivers and codecs. Win7, as it's installed, does a shitty job on the Atom 330. You need to use the Intel network driver (and turn off all hardware aid!), and do not forget to install the Atom 330 optimized codecs - otherwise you will not be able to see 1080i video.
I also installed a Soundblaster 5.1 PCI soundcard, with the correct drivers.
And that's all.
The machine is running almost 24x7 for 2 years and something, and I have no (many) regrets. My power bill lowered enough to spend some money on yet another 4T of storage for multimedia with the savings not much time ago.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
They break in predictable ways. All equipment will have failures. Do you want to spend the time swapping power supplies and hard drives that tell you when they have failed, or figuring out what the fuck is the matter with this broken box?
A good example is something I've experienced multiple times. A hard drive in an array fails hard. In a Proliant, you get a red light and the machine keeps running. In a Dell or IBM, it takes down the whole disk bus and you have to take time pulling individual drives and reenabling the array until you figure out which drive is the bad one.
And we all know that datacenter servers are used only for running the front-end of 3D games. Oh no, this product must be DOOMED!
Alternatively, it could be also QUAKEd.
Ezekiel 23:20
The one potential spoiler for SoCs is virtualization.
Sure, the motherboard of your generic dual xeon/opteron box looks a bit untidy(and I suspect that we'll see further integration here, and already have seen some, goodbye discrete northbridge...); but if you divide the number of wasteful little discrete packages across the number of VMs the machine is running, it starts to look a whole lot better.
This isn't a 'bah, integration, it'll never happen!', it has been happening fairly steadily in PCs more or less since IBM defined them and Compaq produced a non-copyright-infringing competitor. Discrete option cards gradually get eaten by motherboards, and once it's an expected motherboard feature, the Northbridge or Southbridge usually engulfs it. More recently, most of the northbridge has been eaten by the CPU. Full SoC-level integration seems unlikely for the moment because PoP RAM severely limits CPU thermal envelope and total system RAM, and because certain specs still vary enough by use case that it isn't economic to go one-size-fits all; but integration proceeds apace elsewhere.
True. In the case of web severs serving static files, the CPU sits around waiting for the hard drive to send a file to the network card. Partly because CPU speeds have increased by 40X while hard drive speeds have only doubled, for many workloads the CPU isn't the limiting factor and an Atom would work just fine.
Heavens for Betsy, did you start a sentence with the word "and"? What is that sound? English teachers attempting suicide with a large ice picks in their eyes.
Is it 64 bit?
Is it 64 bit?
Internally yes, with some instructions processing 128-bits. The address buss is 40-bits wide, limiting? physical memory to 1TB